Walter Bagehot - The English Constitution (1867)

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A severe though not unfriendly critic of our institutions said that 'the cure for admiring the House of Lords was to go and look at it.'

Walter Bagehot
The best reason why Monarchy is a strong government is, that it is an intelligible government. The mass of mankind understand it, and they hardly anywhere in the world understand any other.

Walter Bagehot
A bureaucracy is sure to think that its duty is to augment official power, official business, or official members, rather than to leave free the energies of mankind; it overdoes the quantity of government, as well as impairs its quality.

Walter Bagehot
An Opposition, on coming into power, is often like a speculative merchant whose bills become due. Ministers have to make good their promises, and they find a difficulty in so doing.

Walter Bagehot
The characteristic of the English Monarchy is that it retains the feelings by which the heroic kings governed their rude age, and has added the feelings by which the constitutions of later Greece ruled in more refined ages.

Walter Bagehot
An ambassador is not simply an agent; he is also a spectacle.

Walter Bagehot
By the structure of the world we often want, at the sudden occurrence of a grave tempest, to change the helmsman—to replace the pilot of the calm by the pilot of the storm.

Walter Bagehot
The soldier of today is a quiet, grave man [...] perhaps like Count Moltke, 'silent in seven languages'.

Walter Bagehot
So long as the human heart is strong and the human reason weak, Royalty will be strong because it appeals to diffused feeling, and Republics weak because they appeal to understanding.

Walter Bagehot
Under a Presidential government, a nation has, except at the electing moment, no influence; it has not the ballot-box before it; its virtue is gone, and it must wait till its instant of despotism again returns.

Walter Bagehot
The apparent rulers of the English nation are like the most imposing personages of the a splendid procession; it is by them that the mob are influenced; it is they who the inspectors cheer. The real rulers are secreted in second hand carriages; no one cares for them or asks about them, but they are obeyed implicitly and unconsciously by reason of the splendour of those who eclipsed and preceded them.

Walter Bagehot
A political country is like an American forest: you only have to cut down the old trees, and immediately new trees come up to replace them; the seeds were waiting in the ground, and they began to grow as soon as the withdrawal of the old ones brought in light and air.

Walter Bagehot
A princely marriage is the brilliant edition of a universal fact, and, as such, it rivets mankind.

Walter Bagehot
The mystic reverence, the religious allegiance, which are essential to a true monarchy, are imaginative sentiments that no legislature can manufacture in any people.

Walter Bagehot
Throughout the greater part of his life George III was a kind of 'consecrated obstruction'.

Walter Bagehot
No orator ever made an impression by appealing to men as to their plainest physical wants, except when he could allege that those wants were caused by some one's tyranny.

Walter Bagehot
It is often said that men are ruled by their imaginations; but it would be truer to say they are governed by the weakness of their imaginations.

Walter Bagehot
Under a cabinet constitution at a sudden emergency this people can choose a ruler for the occasion. It is quite possible and even likely that he would not be ruler before the occasion. The great qualities, the imperious will, the rapid energy, the eager nature fit for a great crisis are not required—are impediments—in common times. A Lord Liverpool is better in everyday politics than a Chatham—a Louis Philippe far better than a Napoleon. By the structure of the world we want, at the sudden occurrence of a grave tempest, to change the helmsman—to replace the pilot of the calm by the pilot of the storm.

Walter Bagehot
It is an inevitable defect, that bureaucrats will care more for routine than for results.

Walter Bagehot
It has been said, not truly, but with a possible approximation to truth, that in 1802 every hereditary monarch was insane.

Walter Bagehot
The order of nobility is of great use, too, not only in what it creates, but in what it prevents. It prevents the rule of wealth—the religion of gold. This is the obvious and natural idol of the Anglo-Saxon.

Walter Bagehot
The British monarchy:
. Its mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight upon magic. We must not bring the Queen into the combat of politics, or she will cease to be reverenced by all combatants.

Walter Bagehot
The natural impulse of the English people is to resist authority.

Walter Bagehot
If you want to raise a certain cheer in the House of Commons, make a general panegyric on economy; if you want to invite a sure defeat, propose a particular saving.

Walter Bagehot
The caucus is a sort of representative meeting which sits voting and voting till they have cut out all the known men against whom much is to be said, and agreed on some unknown man against whom there is nothing known, and therefore nothing to be alleged.

Walter Bagehot
Cabinet governments educate the nation; the presidential does not educate it, and may corrupt it.

Walter Bagehot
Above all things our royalty is to be reverenced, and if you begin to poke about it you cannot reverence it…Its mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight upon magic.

Walter Bagehot
But of all nations in the world the English are perhaps the least a nation of pure philosophers.

Walter Bagehot
Not only does a bureaucracy tend to under-government in point of quality; it tends to over-government in point of quantity.

Walter Bagehot
Efficiency in an assembly requires a solid mass of steady votes; and these are collected by a deferential attachment to particular men, or by a belief in the principles that those men represent, and they are maintained by fear of those men - by the fear that if you vote against them, you may soon yourself have no vote at all.

Walter Bagehot